Part-2 Is it possible to write about this topic without feeling that you are perpetuating that which one abhors?
Du Bois had said the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate In the film Get Out (directed by Jordon Peele) actor Daniel Kaluuya plays a major role and recounts having to plumb a ‘torrid emotion’ when his character’s mother dies as a result of a hit and run incident and says... I felt that thing of not wanting to confront your demons, which I think is true for a lot of black men. There are of black men running around with crazy trauma scars and they should be going to therapy. They should be sitting down and talking to people. But they can’t. If you’ve got the armour of being a man, and the armour of being a black man, that hyper masculine thing can make those scars deeper (Guardian, Guide 18 March 2017) How do I, you or we get out of the binary of black / white or colonized / colonizer mind-set? The same W.E.B Dubois noted as the problem of the twentieth century the colour-line, is still the problem in the 21st Century. I do not have the answer and do not think that change in the machine is eminent. Nast (2015) termed it the Machine-Phallus, where the white man identifies with machines and assumes ontological superiority over persons of colour and white women, this has not yet been eradicated. There are those of us, regardless of colour, that do our best not to be driven by the myth of the machine. As a therapist I have a duty to find my own independent way of seeing and being which we call self-awareness in order to help those I meet in my life’s work and hopefully help them to do the same. For me, what this will take is an ethic embodied in Ubuntu (for a later blog) where humanity is shaped by interaction with others, which is a possible way out of the Machine-Phallus. He lets his armour down and says to his therapist... I hate being black! But could not tell anyone, how could I, how could I hate me? It doesn’t make sense… Ever since I was able to understand there was difference in the world and that being black was bad, I think this has continued to affect how I see the world and my place in it. Hate, unlike anger, has an enduring affect and has been confused with anger, which passes. Hate is seen as the threat to ones ego or death instinct (Freud, 1915). Freud knew only too well what hate was, and his ambivalence about sociocultural issues such as race, gender and religion…as he was keenly aware of anti-Semitism toward his family and other Jews while growing up, and yet never formally wrote about the effects of oppression, the traumatic effects of the Nazi Holocaust and anti-Semitism, contributed to his neglect of sociocultural factors and social oppression for subsequent generations of psychoanalysis (Zaretsky, 2006) Sartre (1967) said… No one can treat a man like a dog without first regarding him as man…this impossible dehumanisation of the oppressed, on the other side of the coin, becomes the alienation of the oppressor…in short, he must dehumanise himself For this client, it made no sense to him how he could hate what he thought was himself and felt that being black was bad. One can only begin to imagine the battle that raged ‘inside’ him and the scars of his formative experiences beginning with his mother. He described his mother as a beautiful ‘fair-skinned’ woman who met his father ‘a dark skinned man’ on the ship travelling over from Barbados to London to study and become a nurse. His mother told him she would not have dated his father because he was too black, and she told of being raped twice by one of the white men who lived at the property where she was living in Gloucester when she was 16 years old. This resulted in her travelling to London with a chaperone and somehow meeting up with his father again. His mother informed him that on the day of his birth he was taken away by the midwife to be cleaned up and when brought back his mother screamed…that’s not my baby, bring me my baby, that baby is too black and ugly! Was this the start of the process of becoming alienated from his true self? In its basic sense alienation is becoming other, if something has simply become other than it has been, then the term alienation is neutral. But this was impossible, he could not become anything else other than what he was and could become in the future (which he did become eventually), having someone say to him at this or any point prior to doing the necessary work... “You should embrace your race or culture” would be the most ridiculous noise he could hear… Oh, this seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this world, a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world…a peculiar sensation, the double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others (Du Bois) It is thought that histories of colonialism and slavery have influenced majority and minority groups’ perceptions of skin colour, related unconsciousness and conscious associations with ethnic belongings, acculturation, and sense of goodness and badness, and how these associations are mirrored in the therapeutic relationship… where whiteness is seen and not named…it is present everywhere but absent from discussion…it is the silent norm (Tummala-Narra, 2007) He speaks of his mother in terms of being beautiful and places an emphasis on her colour (fair-skinned) and his father's colour (dark-skinned). Where was the neutral zone for this child now a man? It appeared that there was only good or bad. Although he was to later find the good in himself, his journey in therapy with an-other would be long in searching to find the therapist, whether black or white, who has and continues to transcend the binary myth of black and white, who acknowledges its presence in the world and the impact it can have, such as reducing persons to things, to degrade them from an I-thou to an I-it relation. There have been recent developments in psychoanalytic theory regarding various aspects of diversity reenergising interest in the social and cultural domains and intersubjectivity. So how would the analyst be shaping the analysand’s conscious and unconscious experience of effective and symbolic communications? Part – 1
The lion’s story will never be told as long as the hunter is telling the story ‘African proverb, Stevenson, 1997’ In June 2017 we will see new guidelines when sentencing ‘children’ between the ages of 10 and 17 years old. Judges are told to consider whether the young ‘criminal’ has suffered discrimination as an ethnic minority before sentencing, as the sentencing Council for England and Wales says offending may be ‘partly’ a product of discrimination and negative experiences of authority. From the Latin ‘discrimen’ that which separates is what we call discrimination. However, to discriminate against people based on their ‘skin colour’ is called racism. While national statistics show that ethnic minorities account for approximately 14% of the UK's population, the Youth Justice Board says a quarter of all young people arrested in the year to March 2016 were from these backgrounds - some 21,900 people. (BBC News March 17th 2017) We may ask, what has this got to do with us, a very good question which would require more time and space than this short blog. Depending on ones practice setting ‘you’ may well be in the position to ask the actual child who is now an adult sat in front of you, what is your story? I was once asked if my frustration was ‘my black rage’. It might be justified when positioned as the other, someone who has felt the ‘cold wind’ of racism, been in situations where I was unsure whether a racist act was a hit, a miss or false alarm in other words, was I being over sensitive and projecting, transferring my bias onto another and getting it wrong? Nevertheless, emotions (e.g. anger or rage) can tell us a lot about our position in the world and our values. To suggest that rage has a ‘skin’ colour I find difficult to comprehend. I suppose it would depend on our theoretical predisposition. Still, a question would need to be asked, are we projecting something that we ourselves are unable accept within ourselves or contain? And when the individual begins to tell you their story how will this be heard. Would my model limit how I hear their narrative, will my present sense of self facilitate openness to my other and could I really begin to allow myself to be affected, changed or challenged by the interaction? Ralph Waldo Emerson once said “What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say”, This quote could (taken out of its original meaning) encapsulate what takes place when an individuals’ colour whether black or white or the whole spectrum of differences precedes their essence. My interest here is not to confuse or lose the person we refer to as ‘black’ in acronyms such as BME or BAME, black other, black Caribbean and all the other types of blacks there is or even ‘colour-blindness’. The focus is ‘black’ and it’s meaning to me or us and you. If I learn something as a result of writing this and the following blogs then I will be satisfied. If a challenge is posed about what I have written or if you have taken time to share your thoughts about the subject I will be more than satisfied. If on the other hand my blog has been read and nothing said I hope you will appreciate that they are not to hurt, infuriate or offend, but to talk about what I have found to be the untellable stories. Terminus a quo and Terminus ad quem – A person’s colour is neither the start of nor the end of their humanity Would we have ears to hear the other’s story that may conflict, challenge, disrupt or even stir-up anger or some other visceral reaction? How do we re-story their story, how will their story impact on our story. Story telling is the heart beat of our work as therapist and our theoretical approach is only part of how we construct or make sense of the other’s narrative. In one way or another it is said we use ourselves as therapist or even supervisors in the encounter. How would the following story from child who is now and adult be heard from a Person Centred, Psychodynamic CBT or Existential – Phenomenological perspective? I hate being black! But could not tell anyone, how could I, how could I hate me? It doesn’t make sense… Ever since I was able to understand there was difference in the world and that being black was bad, I think this has continued to affect how I see the world and my place in it. My mother is a beautiful ‘fair-skinned’ woman she met my father ‘a dark skinned man’ on the ship coming over from Barbados to study and become a nurse. Mum said she would never have gone with my father because he was too black. Whilst living Gloucester she was raped twice by one of the white men who lived at the property she was staying at, she was 16 years old at the time. Her chaperone noticed this man was giving mum too much attention so ended up taking mum to London and just leaving her in Waterloo train station because she was jealous. She (mum) managed somehow to contact him (dad) and ended up living in a house with his family and two other families. Mum told me he (dad) kept on trying to get close and intimate and she continued to refused until one day ‘she said to me’ that she gave in as she felt guilty as she was not paying any rent. She fell pregnant with me and on the day of my birth when the nurse had cleaned me up and brought me back…my mother screamed…that’s not my baby, bring me my baby that baby, he is too black and ugly! He recounts events where his colour became his sense of self and being taken by a social worker to stay with a white family on a train ride that seemed to last an eternity, as his mother was ill in hospital; the following morning going out into the close with married couples daughter of similar age (6 years old) and being surrounded other children of similar age, who prodded, pitched, touched saying things like, ‘he’ looks like the golly wog on the jam jar, two of the kids parents saw this happening and came out and pulled their children away telling their child not to play with him. He talked of this being reinforced in school primary and secondary and later in prison too. Part 2 to follow Please forgive me for the following 'social construct' as a 'black' male therapist I am even more confused as to what the future holds not only for immigrants in the UK once article 50 has been triggered and with Donald Trump being elected president but also how might this affect those of us who are first, second or even third genearation immigrants?
I do believe that uncertainty is a given and that there are some phenomena we can only but scratch our heads in wonder "how did that happen" or "what made this or that occur?". I have lived UK all my life and as one can imagine growing up in a time when it was common for me to see signs in various business windows "No dogs, No blacks No Irish" was a degrading and dehumanising experience. Much in the way of explicit notices like these are a thing of the past, however, racisim still exists and has the potential to perpetuate the 'status quo' unless the individual who faces such inqualities has the 'agency to transcend' that which is embedded in society. We can change the world one man or woman at a time. For me this means changing myself first which, begins with the Ancient Greek aphorism 'Know thyself" As therapist self-awareness is (I believe) of the utmost importance because we, like every other human being carry within us 'unconscious' or 'bias' conditionings that if left unchecked can continue to perpetuate and reinforce the status quo. Interestingly there are very few institutions that are exempt. I found this to be the case when studying to become a therapist and had to navigate and make sense of the culture within Higher Education whilst coming to terms with what I now believe (for now) will not change in my life time. However, to give up is to accept the status quo. Martin Luther King Jr said... "I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the birght day break of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality...I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word" So, how can we begin this process of transformaton and/or transcendence? "...transcedance is the becoming more and when we speak of this more clearly we do not mean a quantitative more but a qualitative more, a deeping more, enhancing and enriching of life, or if one prefers a fuller, truer humanising of life" (Macquarrie) I think as therapist if we are courageous enough to be this "more", to really engage in 'dialogue' about such issues as it relates to us then we are, I assert, in a better positon to change the world one man or woman at a time. I also beleive we have a social duty to do so, starting with ourselves and the many diverse human beings we will encounter along our journey. By Derek Mckenzie MBACP, PG Cert, BA Hons, FdA . I am committed to staying with the actuality of the client’s or supervisee’s lived-experience, it is an egalitarian relationship, which draws on a range of philosophical insights – including those beyond the bounds of existentialism. Reflexive, questioning and curious, it has no fixed ideology, and I am open to being transformed during the therapeutic encounter. The supervisor joins the supervisee as a ‘fellow investigator’ or ‘ally’ and explores all four dimension of human existence, Social for example interpersonal relationships and GGRRAAACEEESS, (Krause, 2012) Physical, environment, Personal, self-awareness and Spiritual for example, values, meanings, systems of belief and philosophical outlook (Cooper, 2003).
What is interesting about this article is, it sets out clearly how some people may become stuck in their lives which then has an impact on their emotional worlds and day to day functioning. We all at some point in our lives to varying degrees will experience depression, clinical or existential.
"People who experience normal clinical depression may also experience existential issues related to the meaning of their life in the course of psychotherapy to treat the depression. This is a normal component of treatment of depression, and many clinicians will often work with the person to help them explore the meaning of their life if this happens". Read the full article A thoughtful article on how a special time for some, has the opposite impact for others..."For some people, they get depressed at Christmas and even angry because of the excessive commercialisation of Christmas, with the focus on gifts and the emphasis on "perfect" social activities. Other get depressed because Christmas appears to be a trigger to engage in excessive self-reflection and rumination about the inadequacies of life (and a "victim" mentality) in comparison with other people who seem to have more and do more.
Still others become anxious at Christmas because of the pressure (both commercial and self-induced) to spend a lot of money on gifts and incur increasing debt. Other people report that they dread Christmas because of the expectations for social gatherings with family, friends and acquaintances that they'd rather not spend time with. And finally, many people feel very lonely at Christmas, because they have suffered the loss of loved ones or their jobs." Read the full article |
AuthorDerek Mckenzie MBACP Archives
April 2017
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